I agree. Justice is sadly often proportional to wealth. And who needs a class war.
And this kind of confrontation is going to happen again, and again, and it's only getting worse. Like a party where the cops are called and the music is turned down, when they go its back up, so they're called again. Eventually they're going to break up the party - bad scene dude. "But I just want to code, I'm not into all this other stuff". All that is required for evil to triumph in the world is that good people do nothing. This is a relatively trivial battle on a much wider war, tv listings so what, but what about the gene code of the cells in your body? Look at your own hand and think about information rights. I respect the author's predicament, I wouldn't do david vs goliaths whole frelling family either. Having toiled and shared the benefits of ones intellectual output, only to be set upon by less sociable animals, is most disheartening, I feel your pain. I'd take the code down as well, it's not worth the personal sacrifice. These people can afford to ruin your life. But then the hacker meritocracy can be quite brutal too. Intellectual supremacism is what I call the arrogance of belittling those who are not as smart as you. That's still might over right. Better to believe "the strong should help the weak, or at least not persecute or prey on them". Now something like that is good enough to call a hacker ethos. Fundamentalist capitalists believe it is right and proper to conjure profits simply through restricting access to information or other resources based on wealth (charging for it). That it is ok to stand on the shoulders of giants and then charge others a toll. There's lots of information that ought to be the unrestricted resource of 'we the people of earth', but without going to the extreme marxist remedy of "no private property". I believe the free-willed individual is sovereign, if someone wants to be anti-social, its their choice. All this is why the GPL is so important to those who wold make a better tomorrow, preventing creeping lockout by privateers with each new release. Without GPL, eventually the entire program would become under a private ownership, and your unborn offspring will not have access to the future versions of code arising from what you originally wrote. Add to that software patents. A small band of large corporations will own it all, and your grandkids will be nothing more than battery hens, only existing to work, consume, and pollute, in impoverished servitude. "Year 2103 teacher to YOUR great grandson : "Yeah kid, great idea, but like all of the ideas that come into your head, it's owned by attosoft, pay their fee if you want to use it in your homework, then you can make the grade." Think it's extreme? You extrapolate the trends, and tell me what you see in 100 years time. Of course the people won't allow it. But how big a kick in the ass does it take to get a reaction. The answer in my mind lies in generating public awareness of what the public are losing out on with the old way, and what they might gain by another approach. To generate more of what is good, and to dispell the bad when it gets in the way of the good. Eventually this would culminate in a UN treaty similar to the International Space Treaty (that CATO Institute fundamentalist capitalists want to get rid of so they can settle Mars - its true, check it out). This would allow people to publish code and for it to become the collective unrestricted property of we the people of earth. It's got to become like an environmental issue, with the same clear moral high ground. The image of 'hackers' who are dark destroyers, mindlessly or maliciously corrupting employment-generating honest to goodness hard working business folk, will not do it. This has got to come from the freedom of information ethos. Any feedback ? > On Thu, Feb 06, 2003 at 04:09:14PM -0500, John Von Essen wrote: > > This is definitely a very grey area. > > > > According the the EuroTV site: > > > > ... > > Information contained on this server is copyrighted and may not be > > distributed, modified, reused, re-posted, or otherwise used outside the > > scope of a "WWW client" without the express written permission of B. On > > The Net, owner of the EuroTV site. > > ... > > > > Technically, the WWW::EuroTV mod is a "WWW client". Lets say instead of > > using Netscape, I use my own perl script to display the information on > > EuroTV.com within my terminal. My script is acting as a WWW client. > > > > At the same time, I could also use WWW::EuroTV to grab all the content > > from the eurotv.com site and redisplay on my own site, johnstvguide.com. > > This would go against their copyright statement. > > I think you've hit the nail on the head here. > > IANALETMMTISB (I am not a lawyer even though my mother thinks I should > be :-), but here's my two cents, for whatever they're worth. > > Based solely on the excerpt from EuroTV above, it seems clear to me that > they explicitly allow you to download data from their site with any > program that uses http. It also seems clear to me that *reuse* of that > data is forbidden by that excerpt. > > Unfortunately, in practical terms, this isn't necessarily an issue. > Maybe I've gotten a bit cynical from living in the USA my whole life, > but the fact is, if you've got more resources to club your target over > the head with a lawsuit than your target has to fight back, you've often > won without even really fighting. > > The final outcome of a lawsuit in this matter might well set a precedent > that would prevent this from happening again. In the meantime, the > damage to the defendants could be staggering. > > I have come to realize that being a realistic idealist kind of sucks. > :-) > > I do wonder, though, what would have happened if they'd politely asked > for a resolution to this issue rather than threatening legal action. > > dha > > -- > David H. Adler - <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> - http://www.panix.com/~dha/
